The immigration of Tamil refugees to the Netherlands resulted in a press `panic' which indicated the existence of a dominant consensus hostile to the Tamil `invasion'. A semantic analysis of the discourse of newspaper stories exposes this underlying consensus. Attention is focused on the reporting of Tamil immigration in five Dutch national dailies. The article examines the ways in which the press, using its own institutional and ideological strategies, also reproduces, and thus legitimizes, the views of those in the social and political power structure.
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